As flashbulbs pop to record the formal signing of the Takings Act of 1949, tribal chairman George Gillette chokes back his emotions as Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug signs the bill that would flood the ancestral home of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara people. (AP/Worldwide photos)
The Senate vote was close, 51-40, but on March 15, 2021, Deb Haaland was confirmed as Secretary of the Interior, the first Native American to hold that seat since the cabinet post began. The Department of the Interior which oversees Indian affairs, public lands and natural resources was created on March 3, 1849.
Representative Haaland, Democrat from New Mexico, is a member of the Laguna Pueblo. She is a 35th generation New Mexican. Her father was a 30-year combat Marine who was awarded the Silver Star medal for saving six lives during the Vietnam War. Her mother worked for 25 years in Indian education. Haaland pledged at the hearing to work on repairing the U.S. federal government’s relationship with Native American tribes.
We hear very little of Native American history and current situations in our daily news reports or history books. In some minds the caricature of the wooden Indian at the souvenir store joins the happy darkies dancing to the banjo on the plantation. It was all in the past.
Not really. It’s time to educate ourselves on this neglected population of our country. The Native American population of the United States in the 21st century is 5.2 million people representing 574 tribes, now referred to as Nations.
The historical atrocities that occurred when the United States obtained dominion over the Native American continent have rarely been recorded or taught as history to students. When Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, it began a policy of relocation and confiscation of native lands that had been ancestral homes for centuries. Additions and variations of this policy have continued to the present time.
From 1989-1993 my husband and I joined in support of the Navaho people at Big Mountain, Arizona, who were resisting federal relocation that had been ordered by Public Law 93-531, passed in 1974. It included a 90% reduction of livestock. That meant sheep, which have been the Navaho mainstay for centuries, and a moratorium on construction, including repair of existing structures. While claiming to address Hopi/Navaho land disputes, facilitating Peabody Coal’s expansion of strip mining into Black Mesa, the largest and richest coalfield in the nation, undoubtedly played a role in the passage of this law. I was glad to stand up for native rights in the nineties, but my wakeup call to the deliberate disregard of Native American rights, came many years before that.
I began my teaching career in 1961 in New Town, North Dakota, a town bordering the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. It had been founded only ten years before. At that time, I knew nothing of the history of the community, but this is what I learned.
Congress had enacted the Flood Control Act of 1944 as an answer to catastrophic flooding on the lower Missouri river. The key to this project would be the construction of the Garrison Dam. Congressmen realized that the resulting reservoir was going to put the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes under a 600-square-mile lake but again they resorted to the tried-and-true policy of relocation that Andrew Jackson began in 1830 with the death march so poetically named “The Trail of Tears.”
In 1949 George Gillette, tribal chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes, (now known as the MHA Nation,) traveled with his delegation to Washington DC, to plead for the people whose homes and land would be destroyed by this action. But it was to no avail. Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug signed the bill with George Gillette standing behind him overcome by sorrow. SEE PHOTO AT BEGINNING OF THIS STORY.
In 1951, the Garrison Dam Missouri River Project flooded all the towns and ancient Indian villages in its path. Inhabitants of Sanish, Van Hook, Elbowoods, Lucky Mound, Shell Creek and other smaller communities, saw their homes and history disappear forever under the waves of the huge Lake Sakawkawea reservoir. It was the third largest man-made lake in the United States.
The relocation solution that Congress had blithely supported didn’t work out so well. The three peaceful farming tribes had been self-sufficient farmers of the rich Missouri River bottomland for centuries. They preserved the cultural heritage of their ancestors in language, art, music and ceremonies. They were the very people that gave Lewis and Clark shelter and food through the long winter of 1804, without which, the explorers would have surely perished.
The tribe called the creation of the dam and lake, “The Flood.” Every person could point to the place beneath the dark waves that had been their home, their school, the hospital, the cemetery where their loved ones were buried.
Relocation put them “on top,” literally left high and dry on land too arid for farming. Indifferent to the cultural genocide this relocation was causing, the government furnished food subsidies to replace the healthy home-grown food the people had lived on for generations. This led to the development of diabetes, a condition never known before this time. Loss of the spiritual support and meaning of life that their culture had provided led some to drown their pain in alcoholism. The children I taught in New Town were children and grandchildren of those who had been relocated.
It’s taken 172 years since the Department of the Interior began, and 72 years after the acting Secretary of the Interior, Julius Krug, flooded ancestral homelands with the stroke of a pen, but we finally have a Native American in charge.
Sa-Gitts!
(Good! In Hidatsa)
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Lucy Bell, former writing consultant and published author, is inspired by James Baldwin who said: One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. Lucy mines her own experiences with a preference for the humorous. She is currently working on a collection of essays titled “Most of It Was Fun.”
